Fortune 13-Inner Demon
Star awoke before Blai, as usual. The fire had died and she looked for a stick nearby so that she wouldn't have to get up from her conveniently comfortable position next to where its flames had once been. She found one easily and immediately commenced prodding the charred logs in hopes of coaxing a warming fire back to life. With a sigh, the teenager dropped the stick where the fire had been the night before and she looked over at where the Fanelian prince lay, still fast asleep. She picked up the fishing pole that rested by his side, she had never fished before…now was as good a time as any to start learning.
"What are you doing?" someone said unexpectedly from behind her. Despite herself, Star jumped and turned around. Chid stood behind her, staring incredulously at the fishing pole held uncomfortably in her hands.
The young woman shrugged and faced the lake again. "What do you want now?" she asked, her voice colder than usual, letting him know that she had not forgiven him for the events that had taken place the night before.
Chid reached down and tried to pull the fishing pole out of the girl's hands, but her grip on it was too strong. "A lady shouldn't have to do these things," he said smoothly.
Star tugged hard at the fishing pole and the man lost his grip on it. He watched her confusedly, "Whoever told you I was a lady must have been on something," she said. "I pull my own weight around here, and if that means fishing while the kid is asleep, then that's what I'll do. If you insist on hanging around, make yourself useful." The teenager tried, and failed, to cast. Aggravated with her own inability, Star tossed the fishing pole aside, "Damn!"
She looked around and was thankful that Chid was gone. The young woman felt something soft rub against her leg and she looked down at the creature she had named after her brother, no…her brother come back to her. Star fell backwards onto the ground and the animal climbed onto her stomach where it curled up to watch the sunset with her. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" she said as she idly stroked the creature's soft fur. In a matter of moments, she had fallen back asleep.
Blai awoke with the sun shining against his face and he turned over onto his other side and muttered something incomprehensible. Within a matter of moments, however, the boy sat bolt upright, suddenly remembering the events of the past night. He looked around for the others and his face softened into a gentle smile when he caught sight of Star's sleeping form, lying beside the lake as it glowed from the light of the morning sun, with the cat-rabbit creature curled up on her stomach. Blai crawled over and reclaimed his fishing pole, his eyes lingering over her face before he quickly shook his head and stood up.
Aiichirou sprung off of the girl's stomach and it hissed angrily at Blai when its eyes fell on him before it ran behind the veil of trees. "Aiichirou!" Blai called, if Star woke up before the creature came back she would be sure to bite off his head, if he was lucky. Completely abandoning the fishing rod, the boy ran after it as the animal led him to the clearing in which Star and Chid had their encounter the night before. "Come back here or Star's going to be really angry with me," he said without any real conviction. He sat down and sighed, it wasn't as if he had given up on bringing the animal back, it was just that at that moment he no longer cared.
Aiichirou hissed and arched his back like an angry cat, with all his furs standing on end. "Oh, come on! Are you mad at me, too? What did I do?"
"He says you don't know who you are anymore," Star said as she came into the clearing through the trees.
The boy looked up at the sound of her voice, "What do you mean?" he asked. "I know exactly who I am: Blai, first and only child of Fanelia and heir to the throne…" he looked at the ground as he said the last part. How he hated that...heir to the throne, if only it was as glamorous as it sounded. But, all that responsibility, all that pressure, it was really the last thing he wanted.
Star smiled and sat next to him on the ground, "What I meant was that Aiichirou knows there's something wrong and it makes him mad. He says you have to get over it and that things will work out. That was why he liked you before, he likes people who don't think too much on the bad things that happen."
"How do you know all that?" No normal person could manage to communicate so completely with an animal; then again, Star was no normal person.
The girl laughed lightly, she had a lovely laugh when she wasn't mocking you or trying to be cruel to you in any possible way. "He is my brother, after all," she said as she held out her arms for the creature to jump into. It curled up in the crook of her arms and she nuzzled it briefly before she stood up and said, "Let's go back; Freid will be worried sick about us," she added with disgust.
Blai watched her retreating back for a moment before he decided to follow her back to their make-shift campsite. "No," he said quietly, miserably, but quietly nonetheless, "he'll be worried about you." When they reached where they had decided to camp, Chid was sitting at the edge of the lake with the fishing rod firmly in his hands as if daring anyone to take it away from him and a sheathed sword on the ground beside him. Two freshly cooked fish were already cooking over a brilliant fire. How long had they been gone, for him to have been able to do all of this?
"Almost ready to go?" the man asked cheerfully as he pulled hard at the fishing pole and its string flew out of the water. He had apparently eaten, and was merely continuing to fish to pass the time. They must have been gone for a very, very long time for him to have been able to do all of that.
The young woman sighed and the two teenagers sat down to eat the fish that their third companion had been kind enough to catch for them. But, before too long, the girl tossed the remnants of her fish, which she only barely touched, to Aiichirou, who took it happily. She grabbed her backpack and, realizing that she intended to leave quickly, Blai shoved the rest of his own fish in his mouth and fumbled with his sheath belt. No matter how many times he tied the stupid thing around his waist, he could never seem to get used to it.
Star chuckled and, with only the slightest smile playing on her lips, she tied the belt around the boy's waist for him. Blai blushed at the closeness and when he caught his old friend's eye, he nodded in a gesture that not even he understood. "Where are we going?" he asked when the girl had finished and backed away to a distance that was more comfortable for the both of them.
The girl shrugged unconcernedly. "I'm just following it," she said impatiently. Blai was about to ask what 'it' was before he realized that she was referring to the EscaFlowne. "That's what I've been doing this whole time."
"No, I mean…never mind," the boy ended dully and his voice trailed out in a thought that was lost even to his own mind.
"What? Can't you hear it?" Star asked, turning around to face the boy, "You're the heir to the Fanelian throne and you can't even hear the voice of your own Guymelef?"
"They don't normally have voices."
She looked away and started walking towards the veil of trees, before she disappeared behind them, she said, "This one does. I can hear it screaming." Kanzaki and Van were probably on their way to it as well, or so the teenager from the Mystic Moon assumed. After all, despite everything she said about her cousin's abilities, she could probably hear the Melef's screaming.
Van was helping Hitomi to regain her balance; they were standing at the bottom of a deep canyon and the woman was looking mournfully up at the sky above them. "Why is it that whenever there's a ditch in the ground I seem to fall in it?" she asked sadly as she managed to regain her balance and take a step forward. Everything seemed fine, it didn't feel as it anything was broken. It was a good thing Van had broken her fall.
The king laughed, "Are you sure it's this way?" he asked, as single-minded as ever. The woman didn't say anything and he looked over to see her nod solemnly in his direction. Why was she suddenly so quiet? "Good, we have to get there before they do. The EscaFlowne didn't just get up and walk away on its own. Someone took it, and it might be a trap that I want to make sure they don't fall into it." There was no need to ask who 'they' were, that much was painfully obvious.
"Wow, Van," Hitomi said with a note of faint surprise in her voice, "you've grown up a lot." The Van she used to know, the one she had fallen in love with so long ago, and never stopped loving even after all that time, was kind and caring but quick on the subject of revenge.
"Yeah? Well, I'd like to get my hands on whomever it was that took the EscaFlowne, it's mine!" That sounded much more like the old Van, the one she knew.
The three companions sat down for a quiet lunch, berries and other such things they had found along the way. They hadn't spoken much since they had left their camp at the lovely lake behind them, and Star was okay with that. She had a lot of things to think about, so many thoughts buzzing through her mind like angry bees. The girl hadn't touched any of the food she had been given and instead she watched the rise and fall of Aiichirou's chest as he slept soundly, curled up on her lap. Star placed the creature gently on the ground beside her and stood up to brush herself off. "Let's get going," at least she had the courtesy to wait for them to finish eating before she made her way towards the EscaFlowne once more.
Blai sighed, stood up, and tapped the fuzzy creature with his foot to wake it up before he and Chid followed the girl deeper into the woods. How symbolic. The two boys, both following the one they loved…a scream broke through the boy's thoughts. With a sudden burst of energy, the boys ran towards the source. The dark-haired prince got there first, but just barely.
He and Chid had just broken out of the forest and were standing in front of a deep chasm just a little way off in the distance. At the very edge of the cliff that no doubt plunged to the depths of the canyon, Star lay half-conscious with a Guymelef making its way ever closer to her. Without thinking, Blai lunged forward and grabbed the girl to take her to safety back inside the forest. The Melef was large, and would, hopefully, have more difficulty maneuvering around inside the forest than Blai and the others.
In some unspoken consent, the Duke Freid had gone off to distract the Melef, directing its attention away from the girl and her intended rescuer. It was strange how well they worked together, even though each knew that they were rivals for the love of the same girl. Then again, that may have come from them being best friends and constant companions when they were younger.
The girl's eyes fluttered open, "Let go of me!" she screamed when she realized what was going on, a faint blush creeping onto her cheeks. In her mad attempt to get out of the boy's grasp, Star punched him in the face. Needless to say, he dropped her. The girl landed neatly on her feet while the boy landed, with just a bit less finesse, on his face.
"Keep going! It's coming after us!" Chid yelled as he cut through the trees. Star pulled Blai up by his collar and his eyes hurried over her ungloved hand bearing a scar on the underside of her wrist. As the three of them dodged their way through the trees they heard crashing behind them as the Guymelef knocked through the very same trees that the group had to evade. So much for the forest being safer.
They skirted through the trees and found themselves caught between the wall of a looming cliff and the Melef. The crashing stopped and instead of the Guymelef the three were expecting to appear, a figure dressed in a white robe with a hood covering his face stepped out from the woods. "Our Master would like to meet with you," he spoke directly to Star, completely ignoring her companions. The man extended a heavily gloved hand for her to take. Chid stepped in front of the girl whose fingers were wrapped around the wrist of her ungloved hand. "Oh ho? So the Princess has found herself a knight in shining armor," he said interestedly. The man's head turned in Blai's direction, but unable to see the face beneath the hood, the boy had no way of telling exactly where the newcomer was looking.
"Two knights," he said and Blai felt himself grow cold. The man's head snapped back to Star's direction, "Must you always find someone else to protect you?" Those words cut through the girl like a knife; he must have been one of the people from back then, from that time so long ago yet almost yesterday. "Come with me, Princess."
Chid got into a defensive position, ready to protect the girl he loved at any cost. "Stay away from her!"
"My, my, whatever shall I do?" the man said in a bored tone as he pulled off his hood to reveal stunning green eyes and long blonde hair tied loosely at the nape of his neck. He would have been handsome had it not been for the hollowness in those otherwise enchanting eyes and the satanic smile playing on his lips. "And me without my weapon…"
He was toying with them, "Chid, get out of the way!" Star yelled, using the man's name in her panic for the first time. "You don't know what you're getting into! Get out of here!" The man turned around to look at her, stunned, and in that instant he was knocked to the ground and the other man stood in his place with that horrible grin growing wider.
"Not much of a knight," the man laughed, licking his lips as his gaze bore into the teenager.
"You hit him while his back was turned!"
The man in white shrugged, "His guard was down."
"Have you no honor?"
He looked like he was actually thinking about it. "No."
Blai watched as the obvious conclusion formed in the girl's mind. "Star, don't!" he lunged forward and grabbed her hand to pull her away. But the minute his hand touched the bare skin on hers, she screamed. Wings tore painfully from the boy's back, it didn't normally feel like this when he used them. The man in white cursed loudly and stepped backwards, but he would not retreat without completing his mission, the punishment for doing so would have been much worse.
Star flew up in the air and out of the boy's grasp. Her hair floated around her and a red dragon appeared, covering her protectively with its ruby wings. When the dragon faded a teenager with long black hair appeared where Star had been. They looked almost exactly the same but for the lack of red at the tips of her hair and the manic glint in her cool blue eyes. The woman laughed, a cold hard sound that sent chills running down Blai's spine. Not again, he thought…but this time, it was different.
"I see the experiment wasn't a complete failure after all, our master was right," the man in white said with that horrible smile back on his face.
The girl touched the ground, "If I were you," she said coolly, even her voice was exactly the same as Star's albeit the unnatural chill, "I wouldn't sound so pleased. But I suppose that everyone is allowed a little enjoyment before they die."
The man ignored her last comment and bent down on one knee, his head bent low so that he left the back of his neck unprotected and at the girl's mercy. "Princess, my master would like to meet you."
"One: stop calling me princess. My name is Sayako and I will answer to nothing else," the man nodded as if he was actually listening to any of her demands. "Two: tell me who this Master is…"
"I have been given orders never to say my master's name. But if you would be so kind as to come with me—"
"Heh, don't think so. Last thing: like hell I'd ever go with you!" She disappeared and when she reappeared in front of the man her ungloved hand was glowing blue. She thrust her palm into his chest and he flew backwards, a gaping hole where she had touched him. The woman—Sayako?—turned towards Blai and he took a step backwards. "I've been waiting for such a long time for someone to awaken me, and now that I'm out I'll never give this body back to that weakling. In return for the favor I think I might spare your life. Be grateful, little boy…" She turned around and started to walk back through the veil of trees into the forest.